RICHARDSON, Tony

Nationality:
British.
Born:
Cecil Antonio Richardson in Shipley, West Yorkshire, 5 June 1928.
Education:
Wadham College, Oxford University, degree in English, 1952.
Family:
Married actress Vanessa Redgrave, 1962 (divorced 1967); three daughters,
actresses Natasha and Joely, and Katherine Grimond.
Career:
President of Oxford University Drama Society, 1949–51; producer
and director for BBC TV, 1953; formed English Stage Company with George
Devine, 1955; began collaboration with writer John Osborne on first
production of
Look Back in Anger
at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1956; with Osborne, formed Woodfall
Productions, 1958; directed first feature,
Look Back in Anger
, 1959; continued to work as stage director; director for TV, including
Penalty Phase
(1986),
Shadow on the Sun
(1988), and
Phantom of the Opera
(1990).
Awards:
Oscar for Best Direction, and New York Film Critics Award for Best
Direction, for
Tom Jones
, 1963.
Died:
November 1991.

Films as Director:

1955

Momma Don't Allow
(co-d)

1959

Look Back in Anger

1960

The Entertainer

1961

Sanctuary
;
A Taste of Honey
(+ pr, co-sc)

1962

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
(+ pr)

1963

Tom Jones
(+ pr)

1965

The Loved One
;
Mademoiselle

1967

The Sailor from Gibraltar
(+ co-sc)

1968

Red and Blue
;
The Charge of the Light Brigade

1969

Laughter in the Dark
(
La Chambre obscure
);
Hamlet

1970

Ned Kelly
(+ co-sc)

1973

A Delicate Balance
;
Dead Cert

1977

Joseph Andrews
(+ co-sc)

1978

Death in Canaan

1982

The Border

1984

Hotel New Hampshire
(+ sc)

1985

Turning a Blind Eye
(doc)

1990

Blue Sky

Other Films:

1960

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(Reisz) (pr)

1964

Girl with Green Eyes
(Davis) (exec pr)

Publications

By RICHARDSON: book—

The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography
, 1993.

By RICHARDSON: articles—

"The Films of Luis Buñuel," in
Sight and Sound
(London), January/March 1954.

"The Metteur-en-Scène," in
Sight and Sound
(London), October/December 1954.

"The Method and Why: An Account of the Actor's
Studio," in
Sight
and Sound
(London), Winter 1956/57.

"The Man behind an Angry-Young-Man," in
Films and Filming
(London), February 1959.

"Tony Richardson: An Interview in Los Angeles," with Colin
Young, in
Film Quarterly
(Berkeley), Summer 1960.

"The Two Worlds of Cinema: Interview," in
Films and Filming
(London), June 1961.

Tony Richardson belongs to that generation of British film directors which
includes Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, all of them university-trained
middle-class artists who were sympathetic to the

Tony Richardson (seated at right) on the set of
The Hotel New Hampshire

conditions of the working classes and determined to use cinema as a means
of personal expression, in line with the goals of the "Free
Cinema" movement. After Oxford, he enrolled in a directors'
training program at the British Broadcasting Corporation before turning to
theatre and founding, with George Devine, the English Stage Company in
1955 at London's Royal Court Theatre—a company that was to
include writers Harold Pinter and John Osborne. Among Richardson's
Royal Court productions were
Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey
, and
The Entertainer
, dramatic vehicles that he would later transform into cinema.

Also in 1955, working with Karel Reisz, Richardson co-directed his first
short film,
Momma Don't Allow
, funded by a grant from the British Film Institute and one of the
original productions of the "Free Cinema" movement.
Richardson's realistic treatment of the works of John Osborne (
Look Back in Anger
), Shelagh Delaney (
A Taste of Honey
), and Alan Sillitoe (
Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
) would infuse British cinema with the "kitchen sink"
realism Richardson had helped to encourage in the British theatre. Indeed,
Richardson's link with the "Angry Young Men" of the
theatre was firmly established before he and John Osborne founded their
film production unit, Woodfall, in 1958 for the making of
Look Back in Anger.
Richardson's strongest talent has been to adapt literary and
dramatic works to the screen. In 1961 he turned to Hollywood, where he
directed an adaptation of Faulkner's
Sanctuary
, which he later described as arguably his worst film. His most popular
success, however, was
Tom Jones
, his brilliant adaptation and abridgement of Henry Fielding's
often rambling eighteenth-century novel, which in other hands would not
have been a very promising film project but which, under
Richardson's direction, won four Academy Awards in 1963. In 1977
Richardson tried to repeat his earlier success by adapting
Fielding's other great comic novel,
Joseph Andrews
, to the screen, but though the story was effectively shaped by Richardson
and the casting was splendid, the film was not the overwhelming commercial
success that
Tom Jones
had been. Nonetheless, Vincent Canby singled out
Joseph Andrews
as "the year's most cheerful movie . . . and probably the
most neglected movie of the decade."

Other adaptations and literary collaborations included
The Loved One
(Evelyn Waugh),
Mademoiselle
(Jean Genet),
The Sailor from Gibraltar
(Marguerite Duras),
Laughter in the Dark
(Nabokov), and
A Delicate Balance
(Albee). Perhaps Richardson's most enduring dramatic adaptation,
however, is his rendering of
Hamlet
, filmed in 1969, remarkable for the eccentric but effective performance
by Nicol
Williamson as Hamlet which it captures for posterity, and also for
Anthony Hopkins's sinister Claudius. Filmed at the Roundhouse
Theatre in London where it was originally produced, it is a brilliant
exercise in filmed theatre in the way it keeps the actors at the forefront
of the action, allowing them to dominate the play as they would do on
stage. Richardson has defined cinema as a director's medium, but
his
Hamlet
effectively treats it as an actor's medium, as perhaps no other
filmed production has done.

Other Richardson films seem to place a premium upon individualism, as
witnessed by his treatment of the legendary Australian outlaw
Ned Kelly
(starring Mick Jagger, a project Karel Reisz had first undertaken with
Albert Finney). This concern for the individual can also be discerned ten
years later in
The Border
, a film Richardson completed for Universal Pictures in 1982, starring
Jack Nicholson as a guard on the Mexican-American border, a loner who
fights for human values against a corrupt constabulary establishment.
Unfortunately
The Border
, which turned out to be a caricatured and flawed melodrama, did not
reflect the director's intentions in its released form, since
Universal Studios apparently wanted—and got—"a much
more up-beat ending where Nicholson emerges as a hero." That a
talented director of considerable vision, intelligence, and accomplishment
should experience such an impasse is a sorry commentary. Nonetheless,
Richardson migrated to the Hollywood Hills by choice and claimed to prefer
California to his native England.

—James M. Welsh

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